Nothing That Meets the Eye (34 page)

Baldur looked up at him with a smiling adoration and with understanding. Dr. Fenton winked at him. Never again would he see Theodora Frazier on an unapproachable pedestal, never again envy the man whose wife she was, never again see a golden aura around Robert Frazier II. Dr. Fenton began to whistle like a schoolboy. Life, his very own life, which he had thought so humdrum and hopeless, seemed a blessed and happy thing, full of promise and full of joy. His eyes lingered on a pretty woman who approached him and went by.

“I've walked up an appetite, Baldur. What do you say we find a restaurant and share a nice steak right now?”

Baldur looked up at the word “steak,” and pulled a trifle more eagerly on his leash, turning at the next corner toward the restaurant between Madison and Park which he knew his master favored when it came to steaks.

BORN FAILURE

S
ome men are born to success as the sparks fly upward. Some men start making a profit on penny lemonades at the age of five, gather a little backlog swapping old cars at fifteen, and by fifty the thousands are gushing in from oil, cotton, babies' didy services, frozen cheese blintzes, or whatever else they have applied, however casually, their golden-touched brains to.

Such was not Winthrop Hazlewood. Winnie was a born failure. He looked like a failure even at the age of five, sitting with his big brother (who looked like a success at the age of ten) in a goat-cart photograph that still stands on the piano in Winnie's house in Bingley, Vermont. There is another picture on the piano showing Winnie at twenty-one with his college mates on graduation day, Winnie fifth from the left in the back row, hangdog and unobtrusive, as if he were actually ashamed of the occasion that caused him to be photographed that day.

But Winnie had an aspiration, even at twenty-one. He wanted to open a general store. It was characteristic of Winnie that he never spoke of it as a “department store” but as a “general store.” Winnie wanted to live in a small town. His idea was to learn the business by clerking in a department store in Bennington, his hometown, and then open a store for himself. In his seventh year of clerking, his fiancée, Rose Adams, got tired of waiting for him to learn the business and yanked him from the job and from Bennington to Bingley-on-the-Dardle, where Winnie had always said he wanted to live. Winnie had a little money saved up, and Rose's father gave her a thousand dollars as a dowry, plus another thousand exclusively for the new store. It took Winnie over five years to pay the thousand dollars back to Mr. Adams with interest. By that time, Winnie's first and last child, Mary, had been born and had died in the second month of its life. The doctor said that Rose should never try to have another. Winnie was deeply disappointed, because he loved children, but he never showed his disappointment to Rose. Winnie was a man of resignation.

Winnie had wanted a store that specialized in men's clothing, especially workingmen's clothing, because Bingley was a farm community, and in such things as ribbons, buttons, nails, and hammers—the kind of things people needed every day, Winnie said. It didn't take Rose a minute to see that two other stores took care of Bingley's needs in these lines, but that what the town lacked was a good dry goods store. So Winnie took her advice and concentrated on dry goods, from cottons up to heavy woolens. He also sold some haberdashery, soaps, stationery, toys, overshoes, percolators, and floor wax. These last stocks varied, because Winnie was a great one for buying a bargain in any line of goods when a salesman offered it to him. And the stocks moved very slowly for the reason, as Rose always pointed out, that people never knew what he had at any certain time. If they came back to buy a second box of soap, for instance, there wouldn't be any more in stock, no soap at all, which didn't make for steady customers. The women of Bingley all sewed, but there just weren't enough of them to make Winnie rich. Winnie was fifty-two, and a tired, skinny old man, before he paid off his two-story house on Independence Street.

And even that was at the expense of not getting his store painted, or reroofed, or the cellar waterproofed, or anything else that a respectable emporium needs. Like Winnie, the old middle-sized cracker box of a store on the river side of Main Street looked a lot older than it was. The reddish paint had weathered to a mottled brown, and nearly all the gilt letters on the sign in front that said hazlewood's general merchandise had chipped off so that you couldn't read them unless you knew what they were supposed to say. Yet the store had become a fixture in the town, and most Bingley women wouldn't buy their materials anywhere else, even in Bennington. As low as Winnie's cash reserves got sometimes, they never quite went down to zero, and he and Rose managed to eat, though not much by the looks of Winnie. He was about the size of a skinny fourteen-year-old boy, not very tall and inclined to stoop. He had a clean-shaven, completely forgettable face—a nose that was just a nose, a mouth as gentle as a sheep's, and steady but tired gray eyes that looked out from under very ordinary brown eyebrows. His father had grown bald early, but Winnie's straight brown-and-gray hair grew tenaciously, as thick as it had ever been, parted on the left and hanging over his forehead a little, as it had since he was a small boy. In a bigger town, few people would ever have noticed Winnie, but in Bingley everybody knew him and spoke to him on the street, as if in a town of Bingley's smallness Winnie had become distinctive just for ordinariness. His bookkeeping kept him at the store until nine o'clock and after in the evenings, about the time when Bingley's young men were walking their girls home from the seven o'clock movie at the Orpheus. All of them said hello to Winnie if they passed him, or if the light was still on in the back room of the store they would say, “I guess Winnie's still at it, poor old guy.” And if they didn't see him, and saw no light, they would remark that Winnie must be home early for a change. In short, Winnie was not really a forgotten man in Bingley, not a cog in a machine the way a lot of big-city dwellers are. But Winnie was very much aware that he hadn't gotten half as far as most men in Bingley, though he worked twice as hard as most.

Besides having a streak of middling to bad luck for years and years, Winnie had a few misfortunes that were plain unusual. Like the time his older brother turned up in Bingley, fifty years old and flat broke. The last Winnie had heard of Richard, he had made a quarter of a million dollars on the stock market playing Mexican mines. Richard had written him a triumphant letter about that, and had said he was off to Mexico to buy himself a village to retire in. But the Richard that turned up in Bingley was a shadow of his old self. He had put all his money into a silver mine that never produced, had sold at a loss, and then lost that money at a gambling casino in Mexico City. Richard asked Winnie for a job in his store. Winnie said he could put him up at the house all right, but he couldn't possibly take him on at the store. There wasn't enough work, and there wasn't enough money coming in to pay a salary with. But Richard pled with him.

“Can you do bookkeeping?” Winnie asked.

“Anything! Sure I can do bookkeeping, Winnie. Figures were always my specialty, don't you remember?” Richard made wavy gestures with his hands, and a ghost of his jaunty smile came back.

“I sure do need a bookkeeper,” Winnie said. “But I couldn't pay you more than . . . say, twenty-five dollars a week.”

Richard said that was fine. “I'll help you out with the clerking, too,” Richard said.

Rose was furious with Winnie. “Richard, who's never given you a cent!” Rose said.

“Well, I never asked him for any,” Winnie replied.

“I bet he can't add six and four! He never could do anything but sport around and blow his own horn!” And Rose would have said a lot more, if she hadn't been glad, in a way, that Winnie was taking on a bookkeeper, even a bad one. It hurt Rose that everybody in Bingley talked about Winnie's not having a single clerk in the store, and coming home late at night summer and winter because he had to stay late totaling up his own accounts. Rose had had high aspirations when they first came to Bingley. Gradually she had turned loose of most of them, but she still longed for a refrigerator and a new sewing machine that worked by electricity. Now, what with paying Richard twenty-five dollars in cash every week, it was hopeless to dream of a refrigerator and a sewing machine anyways soon.

Richard had no knack at all for bookkeeping, or even arithmetic. He would sit bent over his desk in the back corner of the store all day, apparently working with his pen, but actually just doodling in the margins, and scheming up ways to make another pot of easy money and move on to a gayer place than Bingley. Far from helping Winnie with the clerking, on the rare occasions when there was more than one person in the store, Richard would choose these times to disappear entirely, sometimes into the bathroom, sometimes out the back door for a walk. He was trying to build up some social contacts in Bingley, and he did not want everybody in town to know that he was working for his brother. If Richard ever approached a counter, it was to pick out a new tie for himself, or to get himself a clean pair of socks.

So it was not long before Winnie was doing his own bookkeeping again, and trudging home through knee-deep snow at ten o'clock at night, so bent over with fatigue that he looked smaller and more insignificant than ever. But Winnie never told Rose that Richard was not doing well, and he continued to pay Richard twenty-five dollars a week for practically nothing. And Rose asked only ten dollars a week for his room and board, though Richard ate more than she and Winnie put together. Richard gained weight and the color came back to his face.

“I don't expect he'll be with us much longer,” Winnie said.

“Did he say when he was leaving?” Rose asked hopefully.

“Nope, but I can tell.”

“You'd just better search him the day he takes off,” Rose warned Winnie.

But that would not have done any good, because Richard departed one day—and Winnie and Rose saw him off at the station and gave him a box lunch of fried chicken and angel food cake—in possession of valuables that could not have been detected on him: seven hundred fifty dollars transferred from Winnie's store accounts to a bank in New York City. Winnie did not discover this loss for nearly a month. And he kept it a secret from Rose.

That was near Christmas, and every year Winnie had been in Bingley he had managed to set aside a hundred dollars or so for a Christmas party and presents for the children at the county orphanage a few miles out of town. These parties always cleaned out his stock of toys at the store, too. That year, even with the loss of Richard's seven hundred fifty dollars to be covered, Winnie managed to scrape up a hundred in cash to buy candy and cookies and to hire the sleigh and horses in which he gave all the orphans rides in groups of six and eight. Rose did not begrudge the money Winnie spent on the children's Christmas. She loved to see Winnie's skinny, tired face light up when he sat with the reins in his hands surrounded by children, with the breeze flattening the fur of his raccoon cap as he clucked up the horses to a good lively trot. Rose knew how much he missed having children of his own.

There was a heavy fall of snow the winter that Richard came and went, and an early thaw that caught everybody unawares, and Winnie more than anybody. About three thousand dollars' worth of woolens, cottons, denim shirts, nails, and whatever else happened to be stored around the walls of the cellar got ruined by mildew and rust. It wasn't only the thaw, of course. Winnie's cellar had always been damp. Winnie had been going to have it recemented, but he had never seen his way clear to spending that amount of money. Now it was too late. Winnie expected Rose to fly off the handle about the cellar, because she had been after him to have it repaired for years. But she didn't. She just put her arm around him and patted his shoulder, without saying a word. Rose's patience with him that day affected Winnie so much that tears came to his eyes.

“Don't you worry, Rose. I'll make up for it this year,” Winnie promised.

A few months later, when a salesman from New Haven told him about a cotton shipment from India that he could have for less than a third of its actual value, Winnie thought that his opportunity to recoup his losses had come. The salesmen had a sample of the material.

“Only one thousand dollars,” the salesman said. “The only trouble is that the cargo isn't insured. The company in India has just gone bankrupt and they haven't a cent.”

Winnie thought about this. He decided to be on the safe side. “I'll insure it from here,” he said. “How soon will they be able to send it?”

“It's already on the way. It's due in another three weeks, via Suez and Gibraltar. You'd be buying moving cargo.”

Winnie could see no advantage in buying moving cargo, but the salesman seemed to think he should. The only advantage was the low price, and even Winnie was enough of a businessman to know why it was low.

“Are you game to take a gamble? Cash on the line now?”

“Yes,” Winnie said. He paid the salesman seventy-five in cash, and the rest in a check on his bank in Bingley, which granted him a loan.

Three weeks to the day after the transaction, Winnie received a letter from the salesman saying that the freighter Bena-Li out of Calcutta, bound for Gibraltar, had caught fire in the Mediterranean and sunk. Rose made him take steps to investigate the fire. The salesman never replied to Winnie's letter, but the Port Authority of New York confirmed the fact that a ship of that name had sunk in the Mediterranean on the date the salesman said. Its cargo, said the letter, was raw cotton, bamboo, and some tea. No cloth was mentioned.

“It's my opinion there never was any cloth anywhere,” Rose said. “Why would the salesman have had one little piece of it in Vermont to show you?”